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Sitting on my desk is a copy of the classic adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo. There’s nothing especially noteworthy about the copy of the book itself; it’s just a mass-market paperback edition, with its spine showing multiple creases from multiple readings. The pages themselves are yellowing with bent corners and you can tell by various marks on those pages that the book has been, shall we say, “well loved”. Even though there’s nothing remarkable or special about this book itself, it has very special meaning for me.

If you’ve been looking through Shaneisms, you’ll see that the last full-length entry I wrote was the eulogy I gave at my dad’s funeral shortly after his passing on December 27. In the weeks since, my mom has had the unenviable task of deciding what to do with his belongings. She asked if I wanted anything specific, and I simply asked for dad’s copy of Monte Cristo. It was always one of our mutual favorite books. In fact, it is my favorite novel, ever. Since receiving it from her, I’ve leafed through it once or twice but as I do I find myself strangely emotional.

“It’s just a book” I tell myself, and yet the personal significance is far beyond that. I see those creases in the spine, showing that the book has been thoroughly enjoyed all the way through several times over. I see that some pages have become dog-eared, some others have small stains, probably from the spilling of drops of whatever drink dad enjoyed as he read through the book for the umpteenth time.

“It’s just a book”, true, yet it is also a touchstone for me. This was my dad’s copy of our favorite book. This was his, and he’ll never pick it up again. He’ll never again leaf through its pages to re-read his favorite lines. There’s something surreal about that, lending a certain finality to his life and my memories of him.

The past few weeks have been ones of full of changes. Some of them have been wanted while others, well, not so much. I’ve started a new job as project co-ordinator for a program that uses filmmaking to reach out to and engage at-risk youth. While I’m excited about it, it hasn’t started up smoothly. I’ve had meetings with the media arts centre running the program, meetings with the community partners, meetings about those meetings, and meetings because other meetings had to be rescheduled because they conflicted with someone else’s meetings.

Apart from all those meetings, I’m still coming to terms with the passing of my dad. In many ways, his death hasn’t fully sunk in yet. That surreal feeling is most obvious when I’m at church on Sundays. We’d go to McDonald’s for breakfast before the service and talk about how our beloved Toronto Blue Jays or Maple Leafs were doing, knowing full well the answer most times was “they’re not doing well”. We’d talk about movies that had been on TV that week, or any number of things that came to mind as we looked over the morning paper as we ate our breakfast. We’d fight over who would get the Sports section of the newspaper first and I find myself still setting aside that section of the paper for him. Old habits die hard, I guess.

The church service itself has also been very different for me. It’s been quiet… almost too quiet. My dad was known for always making people at church laugh, for lovingly teasing them about something, and for always having a kind word and a big smile. I find myself still looking around the church when everyone is mingling and talking and expecting him to be somewhere, talking, smiling, and eating an extra cookie or two, assuming my mom isn’t there to tell him to watch his diet. When I remember that he isn’t there, a part of me says “oh yeah…” and that sense of sadness comes back.

It can be strange the things that can make his passing more permanent to me. I’m no longer getting email updates about his doctors’ appointments (something that was almost a daily occurrence over the past several months) and I’m starting to get accustomed to not hearing him pick up the phone when I call my mom to see how she’s doing. If I go out with my mom I’m getting used to the front passenger seat of the car being empty.

As things slowly settle into their new routine I find myself resisting the acceptance that this is the new normal. Because he was such a big part of my life, as any loving father is of their child’s, there is still a wound that refuses to fully heal. For someone who majored in Philosophy, who was taught to kneel down and worship at the twin gods of Rationality and Logic, this soulful wound defies those two deeply engrained tools of self-examination.

My wife, who works as an art therapist, keeps telling me that my unwillingness to fully accept the “new normal” is a completely understandable part of the grieving process. I tell myself, partly out of a childish, angry spite, that she’s wrong because as someone who majored in philosophy, I know that the Greek philosopher Socrates taught all life is just preparation for death. I, being overly-educated and under-emotional, know that grief is irrational and that a rational acceptance of death is necessary to moving past it. I tell myself that dad lived a good, just life, has received his ultimate reward, that he has discovered “The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn no Traveller returns“, yadda yadda yadda.

I remind myself of all the deep quotes about mortality and death from all the deep thinkers I’ve read over the years, from Winston Churchill to Mark Twain, from Elie Weisel to Groucho Marx. I’m sure I could find more deep quotes if I tried, from ones that would make a good blog article title to some that would look really good as text on a picture of a kitten. I guess whatever solace they can offer, whatever insight I could glean from them, will go unseen and unwanted. For now. I guess that’s the whole point of grief: to not be rational, but instead to just be. To live in the moment until you’re ready for that moment to pass, and to find that moment when you’ve wrestled with your soul and won, for the time being.

I guess grief is the process of time solidifying the knowledge that someone we love is gone, of understanding the true finality of the situation. My dad did live a good and just life, he showed love and compassion to everyone he met. As a Christian, I do believe that he has received his ultimate reward, and that finding that “undiscovered country” was worth all the years he diligently searched after it.

My overly-educated head knows all this and has rationally, logically accepted the finality of it. My heart, however… my stubborn, slow-on-the-uptake heart… is still having a hard time admitting that all the adventures we had together are at an end, that he won’t be there to join in whatever triumphs I have from here on out, nor will he be there to remind me to keep going when things don’t quite go as planned.

Losing a parent is something that the majority of us will experience at some point in our lives. It’s a mile marker on life’s journey, like your first day at school, or your first kiss, or the time you find your first gray hair. The hard part is that there’s no set time when these events happen and the best I can do as I pass this mile marker in my own life is remember the good times with dad, the lessons he worked so hard to teach me, and to do my best to follow the decent, gentlemanly example he set.

Today, March 3, 2015, would have been dad’s 82nd birthday. It’s the first time I can remember that I won’t wish him “happy birthday” and celebrate the day, in some way, with him. It’s, again, one of those surreal moments when the finality of his passing really comes into focus.

Looking through his copy of The Count of Monte Cristo sitting on my desk I almost feel like, in some strange way, he’s using it to say goodbye. Maybe it’s me being over-emotional and irrational and committing all other sorts of philosophical sins, but the way the book ends almost feels like he’s saying a final goodbye to me, one final way of reminding me that life does always go on:

Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget that until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words:

As longtime followers of Shaneisms (your monthly loyalty payments are in the mail) already know, I keep a second blog where I look at Christianity from a more philosophical perspective, trying to remove a lot of the… malarkey… that so often interferes with Christians actually being, well, Christ-like.

For the first time in far too long I’ve updated it, so if you like Shaneisms, please check out The Grumpy Christian. Cheers!

Author’s note: My dad, Ross, passed away on December 27 at the age of 81 after a short battle with cancer. This is the eulogy I gave at his memorial service.

What can be said about my dad that hasn’t already been said?

Over the past week I’ve had so many people share with me the great memories they have of dad, and I keep hearing the same things repeated: “he always made me laugh”, “his generosity knew no bounds”, “he was always so friendly, always had a big smile on his face”, “he was the true definition of a gentleman”.

What I can add to that is that without him, my life would be profoundly different. You see, I was adopted by Ross and Doreen Pennells when I was eight years old… and Ross was fifty-five. At an age when most men are thinking about and planning for retirement, he willingly took on not only the financial responsibility of raising another child, but more importantly, the moral responsibility. Because of dad’s love, the choice that he made has gifted me with thirty years of great memories. I was telling my sister Lori-Anne that, through dad, God fulfilled the promise made in Psalm 68, that God will be “a father to the fatherless” and that God “sets the lonely in families”.

I have so many good memories of dad. Memories of going to the cottage, and going to Blue Jays games; of watching John Wayne and Harrison Ford movies; I think about the dozen or so times he accidentally forgot me at church, or so he claimed; and I think about all the bizarre conversations we had, such as the time he said, with no context what so ever at the time, “Don’t I have a beautiful forehead?”

Two memories define him, for me. The first is when I was 14. I had to get braces, which meant no eating popcorn for the next two years. I was upset because I really love popcorn. The night before I had to get them put on, dad took me to the movies. We went and saw Apollo 13, we loved it, it instantly became one of our favourites, and he made sure to get me the biggest bucket of popcorn the theatre had, knowing that that was it for me for two years. Neither of us could finish it, but that was never the point; it was about quality time and doing something nice for someone else, bringing them joy. That was dad.

The second memory is I was eighteen and we were at the cottage. Wasps had built a nest in the roots of a tree. We decided the best way to get rid of it was to burn it out so we got some gasoline and started pouring it into the hole. We’d look at each other, say “Enough? Little more? Little more” and fill it some more, until it was so full that the gas was spilling on to the lawn around the tree. We got a piece of newspaper, lit it and tossed it at the hole.

All I remember from then on is a bright flash, a loud whoosh and then mom running down the pathway from the cottage, yelling “what have you two done this time!”. She arrived to find flames shooting up from the tree, the lawn around the tree ablaze, and dad and me sitting on the lawn, singed, still slightly smoking… and giggling like a couple of three-year-olds. After a few moments dad was able to compose himself and then he turned to me and said, completely seriously, “I think we used too much gasoline”.

I know that all of us have similar memories of my dad, ones that make us smile and laugh. That’s what I’ll miss about him the most: the good times, the smile, the laughter, the way those blue eyes would light up and you could see all the love in the world in them.

The past few months, I’ve noticed those eyes weren’t quite as bright. I saw age finally catch up with someone who seemed years younger than he was. I could feel him start to slip away and, for someone like me who is driven by solving problems, it left me feeling utterly useless, and even helpless.

Yet in the midst of this I started to see something I had never seen before: in dad facing his mortality, I saw his humanity laid bare and I finally realized what he’d been working so hard to pass onto me and my siblings all these years. I saw that as his children, we are the sum of his hopes, his dreams, his beliefs and the sacrifices he made over his lifetime. I saw that even in the mistakes he’d made, he always had our best intentions front and center. Even in seeing his flaws, I saw dad’s love shine through more clearly than ever before.

In working through my feelings in saying goodbye to him, I remembered the words of the English poet John Donne: “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but is translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation”. This past Saturday night, dad took God’s hand, and peacefully, without pain, in the midst of his family, was himself translated into something mere words can never describe. That deep faith that guided him through his life finally guided him home.

I guess all that’s left to say now is goodbye, dad. I love you. I’m going to miss you a lot… we all are… but I know will see you again one day.

Last week I lost a close friend to suicide. It wasn’t the first time I’ve lost someone I’ve cared about that but this time it hit me hard because my friend seemed to be finally getting her life back on track after a undergoing a very rough time.

Seeing me work through the sudden loss of a friend inspired my wife (who has a degree in psychology and is finishing up her masters degree in art therapy) to write about depression and to try to dispel several all-too common misconceptions about it, as well as giving advice for those going through it themselves.

For followers of Shaneisms, you might recall me talking about my own battles with depression. If you haven’t read it, that article can be found here.

Please head on over to my wife’s blog and hopefully learn about a subject that is all too easy to misunderstand.

When I’m not being a filmmaker, writer, randomly appearing on TV and being a part-time ninja, I occasionally give sermons. My pastor, possibly having a lapse in judgement, left me in charge of my church this weekend.

The sermon I gave is about how people are leaving the church in record numbers and what Christians can and should be doing about.

Sneak peek: “Our society is so very intolerant of anything seen as being broken, and yet Christ came for the broken. He said He has come to make all things new.”

I said that during a dinner with some friends a few weeks ago. Shortly after that I became the target of a hate crime.

We were discussing how we can reach out to the Aboriginal population of my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. Hamilton has a Aboriginal population of roughly 17,000, bolstered by the Six Nations Reserve, which is about 20 minutes away. Things have been tense in the Hamilton area for Aboriginals ever since they occupied a housing development in nearby Caledonia, claiming it was on land given to them in a treaty signed in 1784. After the occupation and its fallout, I’ve noticed a definite increase in anti-Aboriginal sentiment in Hamilton. Those sentiments flared up again when Idle No More was at it’s height last year.

The dinnertime discussion touched on that Aboriginals in Hamilton face an uphill battle in truly showing what they have to offer. Aboriginal education rates are far below the levels of their non-Aboriginal counterparts in both secondary and post-secondary graduation levels, and Aboriginals are disproportionally over-represented in Canada’s criminal justice system compared to their non-Aboriginal counterparts.

The dinner discussion led to brainstorming ways that we can help Aboriginals, especially young men, rise above the social disparity facing them. We talked about the need for respect, tolerance and forgiveness. We talked about how education was the single biggest factor in determining the potential one’s life has. Unfortunately, all that anger towards Aboriginals came right back to the forefront as we were leaving the restaurant.

A man followed us out and singled me out, convinced that I was one of the Aboriginals who occupied and damaged his home during the Caledonia blockade. I told him that he was mistaken and that I purposely avoided Caledonia because I didn’t agree with what was going on there and didn’t want to be associated with it. My denials only served to further enrage him and he took out that rage by punching me several times, including one hit that broke my nose.

After being hit several times, two police officers on a routine patrol of the area stepped in and arrested him. When I was done giving my statement to the officers, one of them said to me “it’s not that often that we have an Aboriginal file charges. Most of them they seem to want to avoid having anything to do with us”.

In the weeks since that incident, I’ve reflected on what it means to me to be Aboriginal, especially in light of such overt racism. It’s one thing to hear someone talk about an something like racism or a hate crime. It’s a completely different thing to go through that yourself. I’ve read about hate crimes, the victim’s statements, the newspaper commentaries about how our society should be better than this. It’s suddenly all taken on new meaning for me.

As I replay in my head what happened to me, how the incident unfolded, one thing becomes crystal clear: a feeling of being helpless. It’s not that I couldn’t have fought back. I know how to fight. I know how to throw a punch, block an opponent’s punch, look for an opening in their defenses to exploit. No, rather that feeling of helplessness came from the realization that in this type of situation, I couldn’t fight back without quickly being viewed by some witnesses as the troublemaker.

The hardest thing to do when someone is taunting me, trying to get me into a fight, is to stay calm and not go for it. I’ll be honest with you, I have a temper. It can be very difficult to turn the other cheek knowing full well that when I do, the person trying to goad me into a fight will just redouble their attack because they see I’m not fighting back. With the assault, if I fought back just as hard as my attacker fought me, it would be very easy for him to justify to the crowds that every negative thing he believed about Aboriginals was absolutely true.

I wanted to fight back. I wanted to hit him as hard as he was hitting me, but what good would that have accomplished? Most likely I would have been charged with assault, same as he was, and any victory, moral or otherwise, that I could have achieved as an Aboriginal would have been gone. I couldn’t fight back during the assault. It’s almost humiliating on a personal level to stand there and take my attacker’s punches when I know how to fight back. Yet, I took them, knowing full-well that I didn’t want to give him (or any onlooker) any justification for his hateful beliefs. The same goes for times when I’ve been out and people have made racially charged comments towards me. Comments like “I’ve never seen a sober Indian before”, or “What are you doing off your reserve?”, or “Waiting for another government handout?” do get under my skin, even if I seem to not have let them register with me.

The racial comments do get to me. I can’t lie to myself and say they don’t. There have been nights, after someone has said something or done something particularly vicious, that all I can do to get out that anger is punch a couch pillow until my arms feel like lead. There have been nights when I’ve screamed into a pillow until my lungs hurt because that is the only way to get this built-up anger out of me in a way that doesn’t cause more problems. I could have made a snide remark back to the people making loaded comments towards me. I could have pushed back when someone purposely pushes me aside just because of my racial heritage, but what good would that do? Nothing worth doing.

I’m not going to let being assaulted get me down. I have too many other things to work and focus on than being defined by someone else’s anger. As I’ve said before, if we truly desire justice, change, and healing, it can only come when we end our desire to see the other person hurt. I honestly do forgive my attacker for his outburst of anger towards me. He was wronged and mistook me for the person who wronged him. I would imagine hearing someone you believe blockaded, occupied and damaged your home talking about fairness, justice and respect towards others would seem like an extremely hypocritical act.

I don’t harbor any ill-will towards my attacker. I’d rather forgive and move on and hope that he finds a better way to deal with emotions and sentiments he obviously hasn’t dealt with. There’s nothing to be gained by holding on to anger or letting that anger turn into prejudice.

In the weeks since the attack, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on the evening’s events. I think about the conversations I had over dinner about wanting to find a better way to help Aboriginals live up to their potential. Unfortunately, I can see all too clearly that the road to achieving a better world for Canadian Aboriginals is one that is going to be littered with more incidents like what happened to me, and done by both sides.

I do dream of a day when I no longer feel the need to say “I shouldn’t have to feel like an immigrant in my own country”. I can’t accomplish that dream on my own and I am well aware that for all the positive steps taken towards eliminating prejudice and intolerance, there will always be those who, when confronted with the choice of self-education or racism, will choose racism because it’s the easy road.

I don’t know if my attacker is racist or just someone who reached their breaking point after having to go through a situation where there were many mistakes made by all sides involved. I’d prefer to believe that he just reached a breaking point and made a bad decision. I’d like to believe that in the weeks since that night he too has spent time contemplating a better way. I could be completely wrong but I want to believe in the best in people.

After all, you can’t truly hate someone you believe in; if they do let you down, you hope that one day they can do better.

This morning I woke up to find that my cat Roxy had stolen my dirty socks and was trying to bury them in her litter box. She could have been doing that because my socks were befouling her nasal passages but Roxy is known for stealing things and taking them to strange places. Case in point, she has stolen many things from around the house, from action figures to stuffed animals, a Soren Kierkegaardfinger puppet, and feminine hygiene products. My wife once discovered that Roxy had left the toilet brush on her side of the bed.

Waking up to the sound of my socks slowly being buried in kitty litter should be strange. It was certainly unexpected, but unfortunately, at least around my house, it wasn’t really all that strange of an occurrence. For those of you that know me personally, you know how bizarre my everyday life is. No matter what I do, or how innocently I try to do something, almost inevitably, something strange or weird happens. Those occurrences have become so common place with me that my family and friends call them “Shaneisms”, as in “that could only happen to Shane”. And these things happen so often to me that when it came time for me to think up a blog title, I couldn’t come up with a more fitting name!

I know what you’re thinking: “Come on! Everyone has strange things happen to them! How strange can your life be” and so I offer up the following:

I was in Toronto and finished up my business early so I decided to go down to the Air Canada Centre to see if there where any tickets for that night’s Toronto Maple Leafs game. As I was in line for tickets, a man in full military fatigues asked “Are there any single people here?” and I said “I am”. He asked if I needed a ticket and I said “Sure. How much?” “It’s free. It’s Armed Forces night tonight and we have an extra ticket. It’s yours if you want it, courtesy of the Canadian Armed Forces“. I gleefully and gratefully accepted and thought to myself “hey, this is great… now I might actually have money left over for those overpriced hotdogs they have here”. I discovered that the ticket wasn’t for a seat, but rather was for a private box the Armed Forces were given for the night.

As the night went on, not only did I end up in the box with members of the Armed Forces, but during the second intermission, the Commander in Chief of the Canadian Armed Forces at the time, General Walter Natynczyk, came to the box to meet and greet those in attendance, myself included. After the game was over, which the Leafs lost (I’m used to that by now…), all Armed Forces personnel and “their guests” were invited to go down on the ice and meet the entire Leafs team. The final icing on the cake is a very strange and weird coincidence: the person singing the anthem that night was Alan Frew, lead singer of 80’s rock band Glass Tiger. It so happens that my sister went out with him a couple times way back when.

While the above is one of the most surreal Shaneisms, it’s not even remotely the only one. For example, I was working on a small film shoot in Toronto during Pride Week. We had finished shooting and were moving to our next location. While the rest of the crew moved equipment, I stayed behind and finished cleaning up. When I was done I started to make my way to the new location, only to find all the streets in the area blocked for the Dyke March.

After surveying the situation, I decided the best way to get to my destination was the parade route, so off I went. As I walked I was getting many strange looks from parade onlookers. It finally dawned on me that I was the only guy I could see walking along the route and that I was surrounded by literally thousands of lesbians. I thought to myself “Meh, why not?” and eventually made my way to the new filming location. When I met up with the rest of the crew, they very quickly realized I had just come from the Dyke March, which led to many of them trying to hold back the giggles as we all got down to work. Or at least tried to.

Some of the Shaneisms are my own fault. I do have a love of the absurd and a sense of humor that has been described as “off the wall” and “strange”. Case in point, when I was in the hospital battling kidney stones, I had to fill out a sheet of personal information. Part of that information was what title I prefer to be called (Mr, Mrs, Miss, etc) and I chose “other” and wrote in “Your Holiness”. Showing a great sense of humor, the hospital staff referred to me as “Your Holiness”, asking “Do you need anything, Your Holiness”, “How are you feeling today, Your Holiness” and on like so. This lead to some laughs for the other patients (and their families) in the same ward as me as some of them would peek out their doorways as I walked by. They wanted to see this person the nursing staff kept telling “it’s good to see you up and about, Your Holiness”.

Not all the Shaneisms that are my own fault are done with on purpose. Having Attention Deficit Hyperactivty Disorder (ADHD) does tend to make me a little “spaced out” at times. I tend to zone out into my own little world and not notice things around me. This happened recently while I was availing myself of the washroom of my local library.

I entered the bathroom, which I thought was empty, and started singing to myself the song “Let It Go” from the movie “Frozen“. When I was done my duty I went to wash my hands only to release I wasn’t alone after all. One gentleman started to burst out laughing as soon as I looked at him, while another, using the sink beside me, kept giving me awkward sideways glances, slowly moving his body away from me. It then dawned on me that the lyrics of “Let It Go” can take on a completely different meaning when coming from a bathroom stall:

“Let it go, let it go, can’t hold it back anymore

Let it go, let it go, turn away and slam the door

I don’t care what they’re going to say

Let the storm rage on, the cold never bothered me anyway”

When I tell people about my adventures, I often get a reaction of “you’re making this up”, or “pics or it didn’t happen”. I totally understand why people have that reaction. If I had to sum up my life in one sentence, it’d be a quote by Robin from the 60’s Batman TV show: “The way we get into these scrapes and get out of them, it’s almost as though someone was dreaming up these situations, guiding our destiny”.

For a long while my father-in-law didn’t believe the strange stories constantly being told me and my wife. That all changed when we were coming home from a trip to a car dealership. We were driving down one of the access routes that separate the Hamilton mountain area from the lower city, where I live. As we did, we had a bodybuilding dwarf, all covered in tattoos, long hair flowing behind him, go by us on his bicycle, giving us the middle finger as he did. We stared at him, somewhat disbelieving, as he sped away from us. Without saying anything else, my father-in-law turned to me, looked me right in the eye and said “All those stories… I believe you now”.

I’ve been asked why these things keep happening to me, and I can only offer up two explanations. The first is that this is all learned behavior from my dad. I believe this is partly right. He is a very friendly fellow, who sometimes doesn’t have the social decorum he should. Case in point, when he tells people, including complete strangers, the story of his heart attack, it always ends with “And I never did my underwear back”, at which point my mom tries to pretend she doesn’t know him.

There is something to the theory that the Shaneisms are learned behavior in that once we tried to get rid of a wasps nest under a tree but used way too much gasoline, prompting an explosion much larger than anticipated, and leading to my mom to come running out of the house wondering why she just saw a fireball outside her window.

The second theory is that these things happen because I simply tend to notice more things than normal and jump at opportunities that present themselves, even if my actions follow no discernible, logical process. I can admit this most likely the case. Having ADHD causes me process everything going on around me, whether I want to or not. It also causes me problems with impulse control. This causes opportunities that either would or should fall by the wayside to suddenly appear to me and I have to go for them, even sometimes against my (somewhat) better judgement.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw, in saying “everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough” was getting at the idea that the longer we live, inevitably, the more varied experiences we will either have happen to us, or will have the chance to happen. Those experiences, both good and bad, can sometimes only be known if we make the conscience choice to know them.

At the end of the movie “Ever After“, the Brothers Grimm ask the Grand Dame about the fate of Cinderella, if she really did live happily ever after. The Grand Dame responds “while Cinderella and her prince did live happily ever after, the point, gentlemen, is that they lived“. That line expresses the idea that the journey is just as important as the destination, that life is about seizing opportunities and seeing where life takes you.

The adventure I had at the Maple Leafs game started just out of me not wanting to go home to Hamilton yet and wondering if there were any cheap tickets available for that night’s game. I walked to the Air Canada Centre thinking “they’re probably sold out, and even if they’re not, Leafs tickets are always really expensive” but I went anyway.

I’ve had friends ask me “why do you get to have all the fun”. I tell them “just go with it… it’ll be fun!” and there have been many times they’ve ended up having an adventure of their own. My wife has said many times “my life has gotten a lot more interesting since I met you”.

I won’t even try to predict what Shaneisms might happen to me next… that’s part of the fun, but I do encourage you to be on the lookout for “Shaneisms” of your own. In the words of Auntie Mame, “Yes! Live! Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

Now, go on… live! It’s time for me to get back to living, myself. That and I should probably make sure Roxy hasn’t buried anymore of my clothing in her litter box…